Intel Corp. has set the brand-name under which it will market its processors based on the Nehalem micro-architecture. Surprisingly, the company decided not to drop the “Core” name and the new chips will be available as Intel Core 7i central processing units (CPUs).

The main micro-architectural enhancements for Nehalem that Intel has discussed so far is increased parallelism – the new microprocessors will be able to execute 33% more concurrent micro-ops at the same time. Additional improvements include faster unaligned cache accesses and faster synchronization primitives. In order to exclude situations when execution units stand idle, Intel also implemented new 2nd level branch predictor.